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The four would-be suicide bombers of the botched July 21 attacks
in London have a big problem. They were caught on videotape. Their
images have been broadcast in Britain and around the world, making
their apprehension astronomically more likely than if they had
escaped undetected.

For this, we have security cameras to thank. London has half a
million of them. According to one estimate, a person wandering
around London will be filmed 300 times in a day. The city is a
pioneer of a trend toward video surveillance that is also sweeping
the United States and provoking howls from civil libertarians whose
internal clocks are set to make a reference to "1984" every 15
minutes or so. Given the choice, apparently, they would prefer not
to have the video of the July 21 bombers, which is an indication of
the suicidal otherworldliness of ACLU-style civil libertarianism.

Opponents of video cameras unroll various arguments about the
cameras. They complain that the cameras are intrusive and a
violation of privacy. But how is it possible to violate someone's
privacy in a park or a subway car? People have a right to privacy
only where they have an expectation of privacy, and that is not in
public places where things they do are susceptible to viewing by
dozens of pairs of eyes. No one should expect pristine privacy while
walking in a subway tunnel, let alone while he is running away after
having attempted to kill and maim people.

If they can't brandish the Fourth Amendment, civil libertarians
get down to practical policing and claim that cameras don't really
do anything to prevent crime; they only occasionally help solve
crime after the fact. Even if this were true, solving one terror
attack alone  and therefore perhaps unraveling networks that would
attack in the future  makes the cameras worth it.

Cameras won't deter suicide bombers  what will?  but they
can tamp down other criminal activity. Cameras in Britain are
credited with discouraging the IRA bombing campaign in the 1990s. On
a less serious front, San Francisco  one of many jurisdictions,
including New York, Houston and New Jersey, that have cameras in
their train systems  saw vandalism drastically decline on subway
cars after the installation of surveillance cameras.

Some cities have turned to cameras in high-crime areas, mounting
them to watch activities in parks and on dangerous streets. The Los
Angeles Times reported in October 2004, "Earlier this year, police
began monitoring seven cameras around MacArthur Park in the city's
Westlake district, watching in amazement as crime plummeted, gangs,
drug dealers and pimps disappeared, and families with children began
returning to the 40-acre expanse in one of the city's poorest
areas." Chicago has used cameras to make drug busts in real time.

Then there is the last resort of civil libertarians. When no
real harm can be demonstrated, they always discern a subtle
"chilling effect." "When citizens are being watched by the
authorities," says Barry Steinhardt of the American Civil Liberties
Union, "they are more self-conscious and less freewheeling." But
urban areas, where the cameras are proliferating, are not notably
bastions of inhibited behavior. The City Journal's Heather Mac
Donald, who is nation's foremost critic of the excesses of the ACLU,
writes, "The only people whom public cameras inhibit are criminals;
they liberate the law-abiding public." When they move a camera out
of a troubled neighborhood, Chicago police now get complaints from
neighbors, who want pimps and drug dealers to be decidedly
inhibited.

The priority of a certain class of civil libertarians is
apparently to protect Americans from nonexistent threats to their
liberty at the expense of protecting them from real threats to their
safety. The New York Civil Liberties Union is considering a federal
lawsuit over New York's new policy of randomly searching the
backpacks of subway passengers. Only if terrorists can get on
mass-transit systems without any risk of their bags being searched
or their images being recorded will they finally rest easy.

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